Ep. 59 - Box w/ Chief Product Officer, Jeetu Patel, and Jordan Bryant on the Mobile First Podcast

Laks is the co-founder and former CTO of Zenefits. Since the company's founding in 2013, Laks has led and helped expand Zenefits' business, which serves tens of thousands of companies. Prior to Zenefits, Laks served as a software engineer at SigFig and as a project leader at D. E. Shaw & Co.

Keith Krach has served as chairman of the board of DocuSign since 2009. Krach started his career at General Motors, becoming the youngest vice-president at age 26. He later co-founded B2B commerce pioneer Ariba; took the firm public in 2000. By the end of his tenure, Ariba had reached $34 billion in market capitalization.

Tony Ball is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Business Unit at Entrust Datacard. He joined the company in 2016 to provide leadership, global strategy and innovation for the access control and authentication solution segments. Ball has deep industry knowledge and previously served as president of IAM for HID Global. He has held executive roles at HID, Gemalto and Schlumberger Technologies where he began his career with over 20 years in multiple leadership roles across the globe. Ball studied finance and business at Bournemouth University and completed the International Institute for Management Development executive leadership program.

Mr. Roth leads Dignity Health’s innovation efforts, which seek to create and test novel services, programs, partnerships, and/or technologies from within and outside of healthcare- that challenge the status quo and have the potential to reduce the cost of care, improve quality, and/or increase access to services. Working in concert with Dignity Health employees and physicians, Mr. Roth works to anticipate emerging trends and technologies with the goal of incubating, studying, and scaling efforts to improve care.

Mr. Roth holds a Masters degree in Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelors degree in Public Health from West Chester University.

Mr. Roth regularly advises venture capital organizations and co-manages Dignity Healths Strategic Investment Fund.

As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

Trey is the Global Chief Product Officer for Mood Media, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

Our Guest

Trey is the Chief Product Officer for Mood, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

• Trey is most passionate about solving the retail challenge today with technology. This entails figuring out how to engage with consumers in a meaningful way – how you do that in the most efficient way, how you create that connection, and how you use technology, most specifically mobile technology..
• When he was a kid, Trey wanted to be a National Geographic journalist and go take pictures around the world and write stories. He realized when he was in college that this may not be able to get him money, so he got a degree in Finance. He started his career at Accenture where he got to learn software development process to solve business problems.
• Trey joined Mood Media as a consultant to help with device strategies but ultimately joined full time as a technical product manager. They take content -- whether its video or audio-- curate it and deliver it to lots of different systems and his role was to figure out the platform component of it all. In the last couple of years, he focused more on being on the shadows and internally-facing to support what’s in the market and take ownership of the product.
• As a kid, looking back, it was all about telling stories for Trey. He loved to write and take pictures and ultimately, that is telling stories and he shares that it’s the same now in the media company; it is still just about trying to tell stories. But what gets him excited is using all these technologies to create that story, that experience.
• Mood is the world’s largest in store media solutions company whose goal is to create greater emotional connections between the brands and the consumers. They do this by using sight (video digital signage), sound (audio, music), scent, and social and mobile components.
• Mood had recently done a visually stimulating study entitled “The State of Brick and Mortar in 2017” which embodies a lot of the company’s learnings. What interested him most is the data showing that people want assistants so we need to augment technology so that associates will be provided with better tools.  
• Trey’s biggest learning lessons include not looking outward as much as they needed to which resulted to development of products which were simply wrong. They learned the hard way that if they wanted to develop something new, they have to have conversations with consumers.
• Network connectivity was also one of the bigger challenges that they had to overcome and speed, supporting different devices and platforms are things which they are trying to hone in on.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Oji Udezue is the head of product for Atlassian's communications products, which just launched its first new product since IPO: Atlassian Stride. A product veteran with past roles at Microsoft, Bridgewater Associates, Spiceworks and his own startup, InterMingl, Oji is passionate about bringing new scalable products and ideas into the world. He mentors startups with a focus on companies with diverse founders, and drives startup investments in Africa as a passion project. His ultimate goal is productizing functional telepathy but for now will settle for transforming how teams and the people in them, communicate and process social data at work.